Being an effective board president, though, means challenging the excesses of business and labor. In balancing the budget and in delivering effective and rationally priced city services, Ammiano would have to learn to take a little from both sides of the labor-capital ledger.
Deal-making can have a corrosive effect on one's base-line principles. They tend to disappear after a while, leaving only political technique. As with Willie Brown.
Compromise and political contortions can also turn you into a boring blob of blah. As with Mabel Teng.
Ammiano will have to navigate the trapdoors of legislating, learning to cut deals without dealing away his principles, if he wants to move to the next political level.
I wonder if he has it in him.
I'll stop hectoring poor Tom soon. But I will point out an opportunity, a ripe and contemporary one, for Ammiano to show he has the ability to see politics and the public interest broadly.
As I said, Ammiano is labor's candidate -- and that's fine. But labor, like business, can be selfish and pigheaded sometimes.
One of the unfair privileges enjoyed by labor is its apparent exemption from the local ordinance requiring political consultants and lobbyists to publicly disclose their political activities. Under local law, lobbyists and consultants have to file statements with the San Francisco Ethics Commission detailing, among other things, who their clients are, which elected officials they have contacted and on what issue, how much they have been paid, how much they have contributed and to whose campaign, and whose campaign they have run and how much they were paid for it.
All this information is valuable to anyone interested in deciphering the influence-peddling game at City Hall.
But unions, who do just as much lobbying and campaign work as any other interest group, do not have to tell the public much of anything at all about their activities. The exact nature of their influence on public policy, and the manner in which they work that influence, is hard to chart from the public record.
From Ethics Commission records, we eventually will know almost everything we need to about what Wells Fargo did to defeat Ammiano's ATM fee measure. But labor, which brought the issue to the supervisors' attention, will not have to reveal any of its activities or expenditures.
That's just patently unfair. At least the Ethics Commission thinks so. The executive director, Ginny Vida, sent out a letter to unions a few weeks back ordering them to comply and send in their disclosure forms. She said she believes unions are tacitly covered under the current ordinance. The unions have refused.
So Vida is trying to amend the ordinance to explicitly include the unions.
This week the Ethics Commission tried to amend the lobbyist ordinance to include unions. (The vote was last night and too late for me to report the results.) Unions, without much explanation, opposed the change. One top labor leader told me they aren't too worried. Even if the measure survives the commission, they are pretty sure they can kill it at the Board of Supervisors level.
That's where Ammiano comes in.
For his entire career at the Board of Supervisors, he has championed public disclosure of political activities. The lobbying ordinance is partly his creation, and he has introduced legislation to force nonprofits funded by the city to disclose financial information.
Why not force the unions to disclose, too?
Ammiano could use the influence he has with the unions to bring them into the sunshine, so to speak. Here's a wonderful chance for him to show that he is not a mono-dimensional union apologist.
I wonder if he will take it.
George Cothran (gcothran@sfweekly.com) can be reached at SF Weekly, 185 Berry, Suite 3800, San Francisco,
